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The role of pharmacists on an athlete’s health care team is a growing component of getting athletes ready for competition...Teams have a need, and pharmacists are positioned to help...Athletes suffer from the same conditions everyone else does. They can benefit from a pharmacist’s intervention…...late 1990s, pharmacists were providing medication management software tools to track usage. Athletic teams’ medical and training staff would use the information to streamline their work, and a demand for pharmacists’ services began...steroid and doping controversies...(also) provided compelling reasons for teams and medical personnel to track and monitor drug usage…(this) tells only part of the story of what services pharmacists provide...compounding expands the tools and treatment modalities available...Nutrition is another area...Dietary supplements are a big problem...because they can contain banned substances that are not listed on the label...A pharmacist can guide athletes and direct them to supplements from trusted sources...While opportunities to work with professional athletes are few, opportunities for pharmacists to apply their knowledge and training with athletes abound...There are opportunities for involvement in sports...that would allow pharmacists to use their skills...The field is wide open…Pharmacists have to create their own opportunities by being pioneers and getting their foot in the door...Understand your field and establish your reputation and credibility so providers can call upon you as a trusted colleague and resource. Then develop your expertise in sports.

The campaign to pass the Pharmacy and Medically Underserved Areas Enhancement Act (H.R. 592/S. 314) made major strides in 2015. The legislation enables patient access to, and coverage for, Medicare Part B services by state-licensed pharmacists in medically underserved communities. H.R. 592 was reintroduced in the House of Representatives in January 2015… a companion bill, S. 314, was introduced in the Senate...APhA continued its leadership role in growing support for the legislation. PharmacistsProvideCare.com, APhA’s website dedicated to the campaign on provider status, was revamped with information, resources, and tools to help pharmacists advocate to elected officials, policy makers, and decision makers…At the state level, 94 bills—three times as many as last year—were introduced to address patient access to pharmacists’ care. Sixteen bills were introduced on the definition of pharmacists as providers; 53 bills were introduced addressing scope of practice issues, including collaborative practice agreements; and 25 bills were introduced on payment for services. In January, the National Governors Association issued a report recognizing the value pharmacists provide in improving public health and urging states to "consider actions to expand pharmacists’ scope of practice." In April, North Dakota passed a series of measures increasing opportunities for pharmacists and their patients. Other states like Washington and Oregon followed suit..."Our goal in 2016 is to keep the momentum going,"…."In addition to success at the state level, we hope to see continued progress on federal legislation."

McKesson Pharmacy Systems & Automation has released the McKesson Clinical Programs Solution, a new platform that enables pharmacists to build customized wellness programs...the Clinical Programs Solution also allows pharmacists to maintain vendor programs for patients with specific medical conditions and saves time and labor costs by automatically synchronizing the data of patients enrolled in a clinical program with McKesson’s EnterpriseRx pharmacy management system...The Clinical Programs Solution offers a wide range of program management capabilities, including a patient-centric view of a patient’s programs and information, real-time notification if a patient is eligible for a clinical program when a prescription is being filled with EnterpriseRx, and a central platform for pharmacies with multiple locations to manage all of their clinical programs.

PBM giant Express Scripts has long been a leader in the fight to tamp down drug prices, and now, it's using its formulary power to freeze out a diabetes drug from controversial Valeant...The company will exclude the Canadian drugmaker's Glumetza--an extended-release, brand-name version of generic med metformin--as soon as copycats become available on Feb. 1...Valeant hiked the price of Glumetza by more than 800% in 2015, Express Scripts says; as of July 31, the drug's list price stood at $10,020 for 90 tablets, up from $896 in January 2013..."By excluding Glumetza from these formularies, Express Scripts clients are ensuring that their patients be dispensed the more affordable generic formulation of metformin,"...noting that "branded Glumetza will not be allowed to process" under any circumstances.

Over the past several years, there has been a monumental push for hospitals to transition to electronic health records and computerized physician order entry, with the hope of standardizing and streamlining care, improving medication safety, and reducing errors. In fact, some studies estimate that more than 70% of prescriptions are now written electronically. Although CPOE has come a long way in a short period of time, is the technology living up to its potential?...CPOE systems are very fragmented both within hospital systems and between the hospital and the outpatient universe...CPOE in terms of safer medication prescribing is still a work in progress...We found several areas where CPOE systems fall short in terms of medication safety, and hospital pharmacists can play an important role in resolving some of these issues...

• CPOE and medication prescribing
• Interoperability
• CPOE aggravation
• The next frontier
• Room for improvement
• Hospital pharmacists’ role

When you have systems between inpatient and outpatient that don’t communicate, important information can get lost in translation…CPOE isn’t just a hospital pharmacy issue; it’s an issue for the profession at large...Pharmacy has a significant stake in the matter of CPOE, but we really are learning as we go along...that is why you see so much frustration between prescribers and the hospital systems. To solve the problem, multiple professions beyond just health care professionals, with different thought processes, will need to work together...

The American Pharmacists Association... announced the selection of the 2016 Awards and Honors Program recipients. Honorees will be officially recognized at the APhA Annual Meeting and Exposition in Baltimore, Maryland, March 4-7, 2016. The APhA awards and honors program is the most comprehensive recognition program in the profession of pharmacy.

American Pharmacists Association – Profession-Wide Awards:

• Leslie Z. Benet, BSPharm, PhD: Remington Honor Medal - Highest Honor in Pharmacy
• Bruce R. Canaday, PharmD, FASHP, FAPhA: Hugo H. Schaefer Award
• Larry D. Wagenknecht, BSPharm, FMPA, FAPhA: Hubert H. Humphrey Award
• Nicki Hilliard, PharmD, MHSA, BCNP, FAPhA: Good Government Pharmacist-of-the-Year Award
• Kristen G. Betts, BHS: Honorary Membership
• Jean Paul Gagnon, PhD: Honorary President
• Michael A. Moné, BSPharm, JD, FAPhA: Gloria Niemeyer Francke Leadership Mentor Award
• The Kroger Co.: H.A.B. Dunning Award
• Ronald A. Nosek, Jr., BSPharm, MS, FASHP: Distinguished Federal Pharmacist Award
• Veronica Vernon, PharmD, BCPS, BCACP, NCMP: Distinguished New Practitioner Award
• Margie E. Snyder, PharmD, MPH: Community Pharmacy Residency Excellence in Precepting Award
• Jeffrey Bratberg, PharmD, BCPS: Generation Rx Award of Excellence

The title of this recent article really says it all: "Characterisation of trials where marketing purposes have been influential in study design: a descriptive study." The authors’ entering hypothesis essentially is that many of Big Pharma’s clinical trials are designed solely for marketing purposes with the trial designs themselves governed by people whose sole concern is drug sales and not the health of patients...Currently, there are few documented examples of marketing trials. Nonetheless, there are reasons why marketing trials should be of concern to patients and physicians. Notably, the research objectives–to promote the use of a medical product–may not be clear to investigators and communicated to participants. The features that suggest a trial may be considered as marketing are, however, currently unclear.

• Vested interests, recruitment of investigators who are frequent prescribers of competing products;
• disproportionally high payments given to investigators;
• sponsorship by the company’s sales and marketing division;
• minimal requirements for data leading to poor data quality
• recruitment of a large number of centres

Pharmacists in Connecticut have been dispensing medical cannabis for more than a year now. The state’s medical cannabis law requires that a board-certified pharmacist be onsite to dispense the product at a medical cannabis dispensary, of which there are currently six in Connecticut...Minnesota pharmacists began dispensing medical cannabis under the state’s 2014 cannabis legislation, and now New York’s law, also passed in 2014, includes language requiring pharmacists to dispense..."There are now three states that have a solid health care model [with a pharmacist to dispense]," said Joseph Friedman, BSPharm, founder of a medical cannabis dispensary in Illinois. Friedman is a vocal supporter of pharmacists’ role in the growing industry. No mandate under Illinois’ medical cannabis law requires pharmacists to dispense, however...Under federal law, cannabis is a Schedule I drug, but Connecticut’s law reclassifies it as a Schedule II drug. Because of this change, medical cannabis goes through the same process as other controlled substances in Connecticut, meaning it’s tracked through the Connecticut Prescription Monitoring and Reporting System, a statewide database updated weekly with patients’ prescription data...University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy is also looking into incorporating education courses about medical cannabis into the pharmacy curriculum...Including New York, 23 states and the District of Columbia currently have laws that legalize and regulate cannabis for medicinal purposes. It’s uncertain, at this point, if and how pharmacists will be part of other states’ dispensing operations...

Curation and quality are essential, because if the data isn’t right it can wreak more harm than good…While the development of accurate predictive analytics has the potential to head off debilitating and costly conditions among patients...it’s important not to rush in without the proper planning...The first thing to understand is you need to have the right technical infrastructure components in place and it has to address what you are looking to do with it...Is the data you have good enough to even do predictive analytics? Because if it isn't, that prediction may actually harm you more than it helps...other factors, including the presence or absence of skilled data scientists; a thorough understanding of how to localize predictive models from other health systems; and how to best integrate existing investments in electronic health records with analytics technology, must be carefully considered...even a platform that offers great analytics capabilities...may not be popular with either clinicians or financial executives if the caregivers need to toggle back and forth between an EHR and an analytics platform...If I'm looking at a patient in front of me right now, I don't have time to go somewhere else, and when I've gone somewhere else I've already lost the advantage of this massive investment in my EHR...So it has to be part of your system's ecosystem...

In the latest effort to make millions from the Strip’s lucrative drugstore sector, a CVS has hit the market with a big price tag...Capital Square Realty Advisors is trying to sell its CVS-occupied retail property at the base of Sky Las Vegas, a north Strip condo tower, for $42 million...That’s a 26 percent markup from the investment firm’s nearly $33.3 million purchase in spring 2014, county records show...It’s yet another move to cash in on a growing slice of commerce in the famed casino corridor. Drugstore chains Walgreens and CVS have been opening more stores on tourist-packed Las Vegas Boulevard, as they make big money there selling medicine, food, booze and Vegas-themed souvenirs, including flasks and shot glasses...CVS, for instance, plans to open a store in front of Bally’s — now under construction — in May, and it opened an outpost last year in the new three-story mall at Treasure Island...Investors also sold a Walgreens property on the north Strip in October for $37 million, or $2,310 per square foot. That was up 33 percent from what they paid in 2012.